Should You Talk about the Election at Work?

How can managers and team members cope with the paradox of tolerating intolerance from the right and the left?

The question I couldn’t face last week

Type the words “Should you talk….” into a browser’s URL, and Google will finish the question in a variety of telling ways: Should you talk to your plants? Should you talk to your cat? Should you talk to your ex? (Answer key: Yes, plants give you oxygen. No, your cat’s scheming for your demise. And when it comes to your ex, I have no idea.)

But Google’s search engines also suggest this question, “Should you talk about the election at work?” And that’s the question that made me slap my laptop shut last night and go to bed after typing only three words of this Tuesday newsletter. That question is also what got me up at 4:38 this morning. It’s now 8:24, and I’ve been thinking and praying and writing and staring at the fireplace ever since.

My problem is that this is not a political newsletter. It’s a work-culture newsletter that helps you convert the pressures of your job into a livable and workable posture. But I can’t dodge that the fact that the election is creating more pressure on the workplace than anything else.

Well, I do have another problem as well. This newsletter’s not just called “The Mode/Switch.” It’s called “The Mode/Switch with Craig Mattson,” a personalizing branding choice that more than one marketer has told me is indispensable in an increasingly lonely world. “People want to connect to someone,” they tell me. But do readers want to connect to someone who voted for Kamala Harris? That’s a tough one, especially when my best guess from the available data is that hundreds of you voted for Donald Trump.

So hit reply and tell me what you think: should you and I talk about last week’s election? I think we have to. But how might I be wrong?

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The paradox confronting workplaces this week

If you weren’t able to hit reply, it may be that you’re feeling like the employees on the floor of a business I heard about this week: Everybody had their head down. Some were crying. But even the workers who were happy were really, really subdued.

Why are both the victors and the losers feeling it hard to talk about the election? Here’s a hunch. Talking about the election’s hard because of the Paradox of Tolerance. You may feel this paradox differently than I do, but you feel it all the same.

• 71-million Harris-voting Americans go to work thinking something like this: We voted against Trump because expanding tariffs is a bad idea, we need the EPA more than ever, and we think Trump will do the intolerant things he promised to do on the campaign trail. If we talk reasonably with those with whom we disagree, are tolerating intolerance?

• 75-million Trump-voting Americans go to the same workplaces thinking something like this: We voted for Trump because groceries cost too much. We think society is veering leftward in crazy ways, and we think progressives are contemptuous of ordinary Americans. If we talk reasonably with those with whom we disagree, are we tolerating intolerance?

If those statements are approximately right, both the 48% and the 51% of Americans on each side of the political aisle are facing the paradox of tolerance. Karl Popper explained this concept in The Open Society and Its Enemies back in 1945:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Americans at work right now feel like there’s nothing to say that won’t make things worse, so our rule at the moment is, “Bring your whole self to the office—except, you know, all the intolerable parts.”

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The other factors at work every week

Of course, it’s not just that paradox that keeps us from talking about politics at work. We’re also just trying to get stuff done in Q4. We also have social habits at work. We are habituated to a certain good cheer. Or most of us are. Last Wednesday, I kept thinking how weird it was that, as the world keeps on ending, I keep right on nodding and smiling and rushing around.

As I’ve confessed to you before, my drug of choice for dealing with political overwhelm at work is getting sh#t done. You know, like putting out a work-culture newsletter each week. (Here’s a humbling fact: I didn’t write a newsletter last week and subscriptions grew.)

So, yeah, all that to say, sometimes we don’t talk about elections at work for the very un-fancy reason that we have too much to do.

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The email that got me thinking about all this

Still, the paradox of tolerance continues to bother.

This week, I got an email from a politically progressive Mode/Switch reader who noted that a lot of her friends were posting to Trump-supporters, “You decided racism, sexism, and homophobia aren’t deal breakers. We are no longer friends.” But the reader’s email went on to say,

I'm the only Democrat in my family and I've been having decades of conversations with my family members to try and move them to be more open and less fearful of people who aren't like them. It's frustrating and it sucks, but it kind of feels like the easy way out to just refuse to interact with people who don't think like me. It almost seems like an act of privilege. 

So what do we do about the paradox of tolerance? If we have open dialogues with coworkers who want to shut down open dialogue, where’s that get us?

One answer to this question is that a reasonable approximation of tolerance is the best we can do. That was Popper’s solution. Applied to the workplace, his suggestion would be that managers shouldn’t try to shut down intolerant political opinions. But Popper would advise that no workplace can have an honest discussion with team members who begin by dismissing the possibility of honest discussion. Enforce those limits, in other words.

I respect Popper’s pragmatism, but I fear its insufficiency. We’re hankering for something more, something else.

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The quality our workplaces need most

My answer to the paradox of tolerance is that we need something more than tolerance. We need other virtues that make tolerance possible and sustainable. You could probably come up with your own list. But I’m thinking of the Beatitude that says the meek shall inherit the earth.

That probably sounds wrong on its face, especially if you hear “meek” and think “submission to power abuse.” But Rowan Williams defines the meekness of the Beatitudes as “a habit of calm attentiveness” and a “freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control…” That kind of free attentiveness is larger than tolerance. It’s a receptivity to a reality that’s larger than the U.S. election.

Here’s what I think that “welcoming stillness,” as Williams calls it, looks like: listening deeply to your coworker while looking over their shoulder at the world.

This is one of those places I’ve gone walking with beautifully distractible people this fall.

This fall in Michigan has been the most gorgeous autumn I can remember. The weather’s been warmer longer than usual, and the leaves and their colors have been slower to change. For me, it’s not been an easy time at work. I’ve been undergoing professional review, which has entailed a lot of self-doubt. “Can I even do this job?” I keep asking my friends as we take walks around a nearby lake. Invariably, just as I’m getting all worked up, one of them will say, “Would you look at that?” And I’ll turn and, lo, there’s a crimson maple. Honestly, I usually feel secretly impatient. I feel irritated that my friends are losing sight of me for the forest.

But maybe my friends aren’t distracted by the world over my shoulder. Maybe they require the world over my shoulder to hear me at all. Maybe their “welcoming stillness” has to extend not only to me but to the autumn around us. Maybe that’s the only way to hear my self-doubts aright.

Honestly, I have no idea what it would look like to inherit the earth. It makes me think of the comedian Steven Wright: “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” But whatever it looks like to inherit the earth, it’s something larger than winning an election. Looking over the shoulder of your colleague who voted some crazy way might mean admitting that the world’s seeing massive shifts everywhere.

Maybe what we were talking about in the election wasn’t what we thought we were talking about.

So the mode/switch for this week is a foreground/background shift. Generous receptivity to each other means receptivity to the world over each other’s shoulders.¹ Let’s take more than tolerance and give more than focus, and let’s agree that we need what the world’s saying through us and what it’s saying beyond us.

-craig

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If you’re looking for a resource to strengthen your receptivity in the workplace, I’ll hope you’ll purchase to read or listen to my new book, Digital Overwhelm, addressing six different modes of organizational communication. It doesn’t get rid of overwhelm. It just helps you overwhelm better.

Like usual, Hannah Sherbrooke, the communications coordinator for the Mode/Switch, has put together a playlist to energize your trust-building work at work.

1. I encountered the practice of over-the-shoulder-looking from the writings of Martin Laird. See especially his book Into the Silent Lands.